Spring Training is well underway down in Viera. This is the season, then, of portents and omens–the latest and most amusing of which was the story of an osprey dropping a fish onto the Nats outfield. Not having any expertise in the art of augury, I don’t think I can really comment about the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of such an omen for the upcoming season.
What I can offer you, however, is the results of my own admittedly crude projection system. Long-time readers will know that I like to think of the baseball season as a single inning of a baseball game writ very very large. In the top of the inning, we see the home team take the field, and see how good the pitching and the defense are at getting opposing batters out. In the bottom of the inning, we watch the home team at bat, and see how well they drive in runs. Then we count the runs allowed in the top of the inning and the runs scored in the bottom of the inning–if the home team scored more runs than the other team, they win.
If you want the nuts and bolts of my projection system, please, read the post I’ve linked above. It describes the general outline of the system as clearly as I can.
This year, however, I’m making a few changes to the Natstradamus projection system.
First, in pitching, I have replaced FIP with xFIP. I don’t know enough about home run/fly ball rates to tell, really, which pitchers are “lucky” or “unlucky” with respect to how many home runs they give up on fly balls. xFIP fixes that for me by normalizing runs allowed by a pitcher to a league-average home run/fly ball rate. Some pitchers get better; other pitchers get worse; but I think over all that might be a more fair way of evaluating pitchers for the purposes of this projection system.
Second, I have tweaked the defensive calculations slightly. Instead of using UZR, I have calculated a UZR/game, and then multiply that by the number of games in which I expect each player to appear. Again, this is crude, and defensive metrics are highly unstable anyway, but hey, it’s all I’ve got.
Remember, my projections are based on four-year trailing averages for each stat. That is, they’re the averages of the past four years.
With those preliminaries out of the way, let’s start this year’s predictions off by going through the 2013 Nationals’ projected 25 man roster:
Starting Rotation
- Stephen Strasburg, xFIP 2.56
- Gio Gonzales, xFIP 3.81. I do not believe Gio will be subject to a suspension for his alleged involvement in the Biogenesis scandal. I explained my view on the situation here.
- Jordan Zimmermann, xFIP 3.71.
- Ross Detwiler, xFIP 4.44
- Dan Haren, xFIP 3.37.
Starting Position Players
- Adam LaRoche, 1B.
- Danny Espinosa, 2B
- Ryan Zimmerman, 3B
- Ian Desmond, SS
- Bryce Harper, LF
- Denard Span, CF.
- Jayson Werth, RF
- Wilson Ramos, C
- Kurt Suzuki, C. I have Ramos and Suzuki splitting playing time evenly.
Bench
- Chad Tracy, OF/3B
- Tyler Moore, OF/1B
- Steve Lombardozzi, IF/OF
- Roger Bernadina, OF
Bullpen
- Rafael Soriano, xFIP 3.6, Primary Closer
- Drew Storen, xFIP 3.46, Primary Set-up, Back-up Closer
- Tyler Clippard, xFIP 3.54
- Ryan Mattheus, xFIP 4.48
- Zach Duke, xFIP 4.34, Left-handed long reliever/Spot starter
- Craig Stammen, xFIP 3.96, Right-handed long reliever/Spot Starter
- Bill Bray, xFIP 4.19, Left-handed one-out guy. This is probably the most controversial pick; others might put Henry Rodriguez or Christian Garcia here instead. But I’m going to assume Bray heads north with the club.
No surprises, then. Stay tuned as we discuss pitching and defense in Part 2 of our projections.
Natstradamus 
Great stuff, as always. For catchers, how did you deal with quantifying their defensive contributions, since UZR isn’t available?
This is a problem I have not been able to solve. As I see it, Catcher defense amounts to the ability to cleanly field bunts, range in catching popups and fly balls, and the quality of the arm for throws to first and second (the latter mainly to prevent stolen bases). I keep hoping that a better defensive metric than UZR will be developed that takes these sorts of things into account–but since I have decided to use UZR as my defensive metric, I can’t find a way to work catcher defense into the model in a way that harmonizes with UZR, if that makes sense.
UZR also ignores pitcher defense, which is a shame. I was always of the opinion that at least a part Livan Hernandez’s value as a player was in his infield defense, but the existing metrics don’t give us a handle on how to think of that at all. Granted, pitcher fielding might be a very small component of overall player value, but tell that to any kid who’s had to do what feels like endless hours of PFPs…
I think the Fielding (Fld) stat from Fangraphs is derived from UZR, and includes catchers, but I don’t know all of the inner workings of how it’s calculated to say with 100% conviction. But yes, quantifying catching defense in a bear. Awesome work, Ouij!